At face value, at issue in the Civil War was an increasingly tax-hungry and tyrannical federal government, and the fight for states rights. The fathers of Southern independence were certainly right about growing federal tyranny - look where we are now - and they were right about it then, too. The North had a history of imposing economic controls upon the South that put a damper on economic progress - see Tariff of Abominations. To me, and to many others, the Confederate flag is a symbol of resistance to unjust federal laws.
Regardless of what many of the soldiers in the field might have been fighting for, the leaders of the rebellion (i.e., the politicians who actually declared secession) actually saw the Republican victory as leading to the destruction of slavery through not upholding the slave system. A Republican administration could have appointed federal judges who would eventually have overturned the Dred Scott decision, refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, eliminated the “gag rule” that prevented slavery from being discussed in Congress, allowed abolitionist tracts to be sent through the federal mail, and worked to prevent the further spread of slavery. (In other words, their rebellion was in reality resistance to the nonenforcement and eventual overturning of unjust federal laws.) The federal tyranny they saw looming before them was the “tyranny” of Northerners abolishing slavery against the will of Southerners (which was somehow very much more unjust than the federal government under Southern control enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act in the northern states and against what surely was the rights of the northern states to nullify the operation of a law they saw as unjust and an insult to the dignity of man, but “states rights” really just meant the right to own slaves, and “nullification” really just meant the right of Southern states to flout federal law):
"The rights of the South, and the institution of slavery, are not endangered by the triumph of Mr. Lincoln, as a man; but they are in imminent danger from the triumph of the powerful party which he represents, and of the fanatical abolition sentiment which brought him into power, as the candidate of the Northern section of the Union, over the united opposition of the Southern section against him. The party embracing that sentiment, has constantly enied, and still denies, our equality in the Union, and our right to hold our slaves as property; and avows its purpose to take form us our property, so soon as it has the power. Its ability to elect Mr. Lincoln as its candidate, shows it now has the power to control the Executive branch of the Government. As the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, appoints the Judges of the Supreme Court of the United States, when vaancies occur, its control of the Executive power will, in a few years, give it control of the Judicial Department; while the constant increase of abolition sentiment, in the Northern States, now largely in the majority in Congress, together with the admission of other free States, will very soon, give it the power in the Legislative Department. The whole government will then be in the hands of our enemies…
“Second, What will be the result to the institution of slavery, which will follow submission to the inauguration and administration of Mr. Lincoln as the President of one section of the Union? My candid opinion is, that it will be the total abolition of slavery, and the utter ruin of the South, in less than twenty-five years. If we submit now, we satisfy the Northern people that, come what may, we will never resist. If Mr. Lincoln places among us his Judges, District Attorneys, Marshals, Post Masters, Custom House officers, etc., etc., by the end of his administration, with the control of these men, and the distribution of public patronage, he will have succeeded in dividing us to an extent that will destroy all our moral powers, and prepare us to tolerate the running of a Republican ticket, in most of th States of the South, in 1864…This would soon give it the control of our elections. We would then be powerless, and the aboltionists would press forward, with a steady step, to the accomplishment of their object. They would refuse to admit any more slave States to the Union. They would abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and at the Forts, Arsenals and Dock Yards, within the Southern States, which belong to the United States. They would then abolish the internal slave trade between the States…These steps would be taken one at a time, cautiously, and our people would submit. Finally, when we wee sufficiently humiliated, and sufficiently in their power, they would abolish slavery in the States. It will not be many years before enough of free States may be formed out of the present territories of the United States, and admitted into the Union, to give them sufficient strength to change the Constitution, and remove all Constitutional barriers which now deny to Congress this power.” (Public letter of Joseph E. Brown, 7 December 1860, who on the strength of it was elected Georgia’s governor during the Civil War; the text can be found in William W. Freeling and Craig M. Simpson, eds., Secesson Debated: Georgia’s Showdown in 1860, pp. 146-59; the passage quoted is pp. 147-9. The whole book is well worth reading.) Brown continued, by the way, to argue that the destruction of slavery would result in the impoverishment of all white Southerners, not only the large landowning class, for an attack on the property of some is an attack on the property of all. In other words, like many Southerners, Brown saw slavery as an essential, fundamental part of Southern society whose destruction would immediately entail the destruction of all the rest of the Southern way of life.
I think the issue that’s really at hand, here, is whether the Civil War can be reduced to “a war over slavery.” I don’t think so. Southern slavery wasn’t abolished by the North until well into the war, as part of the “total war” doctrine, and even then, border states kept their slaves.
In fact, this was because of the same constitutional barriers that Brown mentioned in the last sentence above, which Lincoln studiously observed in the Emancipation Proclamation by freeing only the slaves in lands in revolt once they had been reconquered; the border states were not in revolt and thus Lincoln had no constitutional authority for taking what was still constitutionally protected property.
Abraham Lincoln stated at the beginning that he was willing to endure slavery if the Union could be preserved;
Probably in part because of Fremont’s failure in the 1856 election, widely thought to be due to his perceived willingness to court civil war in the name of free soil.
only later was slavery used, by him and others, as a justification for forcing certain states to remain in the Union.
“Forcing”? Would you care to explain which measures you mean by that word?
